All Posts in Category: OP-ED

The concept of benevolence is very important part of Gulen Movement. Turkish speaking community calls Gulen Movement as Hizmet Movement. The word hizmet, which translates as service from Turkish, refers to public activities conducted by the followers of movement for the wellbeing of other people. It is important to notice…

Eleven years after the horrible tragedy, which changed the lives of many and seems to continue effecting our lives for the years to come here at home and across the globe, as the nation is getting ready to commemorate the victims of 9/11, a religion and specifically followers of this…

Teranga is another name for Senegal. It means hospitable in the Wolof language. It is a door that opens from the West to Africa and from Africa to the West. Here, the vast sand sea of Great Sahara comes to an end; desert gives way to the giant waves of…

20th Century was the heyday of exalting the ego with an overemphasis on individual potential and self-development. The roots of this go back to 19th Century positivism and continue in our modern times as well. Acknowledging that this had positive spillovers in strengthening the rights granted to masses in political…

In the Aftermath of Sandy Hook I imagine that most of you, like me, are still stumbling with unrelenting grief for the Sandy Hook Elementary school massacre of this past Friday. We lived through too many of these events these past years, but it feels different this time. I think…

The Hizmet movement began in the 1970s in Turkey to improve education and grew into a global civic movement which encourages interfaith and intercultural dialogue. It is inspired by the ideas of Fethullah Gulen, who Foreign Policy magazine listed as the “World’s top intellectual.” Gulen a scholar, educator and author…

One might think that a seemingly utopian goal of preventing violence and achieving world peace is a finished debate because conceptual and theoretical discourse related to ethnic and confessional discord have reached an impasse. However, despite the fact that founding principles of modern liberalism, laid by the Enlightenment-era thinkers, have…

Quality education is one of the most leveraged investments for catalyzing development, promoting global health and reducing poverty and universal education is one of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals.  Despite this, there are still hundreds of million children and young people not in school. Recent numbers from the UNESCO Institute…

The basic values that mark the twenty-first century are modernism, pluralism, individualism, and religion. Some claim that modernity embraces individual and social life as a whole, and that it has created new forms of religious, cultural, and political pluralism. There is no doubt that the world today is in need…

Gulen schools have been presenting stunning performance regardless of the society have been initiated. In this article, we would like to accentuate the successful expansion of the schools in different parts of the world. We thought the International Turkish Language Olympiads numbers would be a good indicator of the expansion…